Lesson 8d

Dates

Lesson contents:

- Ordinal numbers and months,
- Complete & partial dates
(Jan.15th, March 1st, 2014),
- Use of "in" and "on" (in February, on February 29th)
- American vs International date formats,
- Birthdays and birth dates,
- Days of the week.

Always watch the video without subtitles first in order to train your ears! It's a good idea to watch several times until you feel the "music", before watching the version with subtitles. Your pronunciation will be much better if you follow this rule.

Same video with Precise Subtitles below ↓ but first you will watch again without subtitles! If you watch at least twice WITHOUT subtitles, your pronunciation will be much better in the end! PS: Subtitles begin at 2:36.
Click on "Exercise 1" after watching!

Teachers:

The dates lesson has turned out to be unexpectedly rich. We were simply lucky that the interviewees used language which illustrates the most useful "date vocabulary" items which exist, all accessible to beginners. For example, an American fellow told us that his birthday is on "7-5-55", using the digital format to show us he meant July 5th, and not May 7th, in contrast to people in most other countries in the world. Other interviewees used "in" for months only (of course), and "on" for complete dates. One young lady missed her boyfriend's birthday a week before we interviewed them, which happens to fall on Valentine's day.

All in all, "date filming" turned out to be most serendipitous, providing us with a lot of excellent natural material for this lesson.